Shaspa device is a linux box that runs a virtual world server and connects to your home sensors. Your Shaspa virtual world can be connected to your virtual neighbour's world at Shaspa grid. Jani took a visit to Oliver's virtual home and became a believer.
Shaspa is a smart space concept, with focus on energy saving and
management. Shaspa grid is the world where shaspa device
owners can connect their own virtual worlds to form one big "shaspa
country". There I can walk from a virtual property to another
seamlessly.
This sounds exciting already on paper (hrm, on screen..) but
when I logged into the Shaspa grid, and walked and flied around
I started to feel the excitement of discovering something
new. The grid common areas were designed to resemble the famous
movie Tron, which brings me to one of my main points:
I was inside a shaspa device!
The picture above shows the shaspa device, it is really small.
There is not really anything in the picture to compare the size
with, except the connector place at the front - the device is in
par with my mouse in size!,
When people started to get their first web browsing experiences
over ten years ago they said things like: "I visited White House
today!" - and they were so proud having done that. Now I
visited the Shaspa entrepreneur Oliver Goh's home at Switzerland! I
was visiting it alone afterwards and I felt like a thief sneaking
in without invitation, half-expecting Oliver to pop in from some of
his rooms and throw me out. It was virtual reality, but it felt
real.
At the same time I knew that the virtual experience I had was
coming from the small box that was inside Oliver's house. The odd
feeling of being inside a device may not be common among normal
people and I suspect only geeks can feel it this way. Nonetheless I
was impressed. Imagine millions of those devices running seamlessly
connected virtual worlds... This is the first time I really started
to understand the appeal of Opensim's grid mode.
Some of the more advanced use cases would include virtual visits
where the host and the guest can communicate through various
physical devices around the house. TV-set, stereos, even microwave
oven could be turned to one big communication device.
In the earlier post to
Maxping I wrote that it would be interesting to integrate a rabbit
(read more about the rabbit)
to the shaspa device. Now Oliver told me that it is already done!
The ears of the rabbit move according to the energy consumption of
the house. Below is a picture showing Wattson and Nabaztag at
Oliver's house.
Shaspa is close to what I visioned years ago and I am getting
one of the devices soon to run my own experiments. I had a
discussion with Oliver and he tries to make realXtend run
in the shaspa device too. Shouldn't be a big problem with Modrex,
which is a dll on top of Opensim making it effectively to behave as
a realxtend server.